Its been over a year since my last posting which was the initial launch of playbook. 2.0 is now available and its a fantastic full featured update. I have been thinking that I need to give the key on the ignition of this site another turn. I have been busy working on a number of projects and this blog and the related wiki obviously where not one of them. At the same time some failed wordpress upgrades trashed the data in the wiki. When I realized the corruption my first thoughts where not so much of recovery but how I somehow had gotten put onto the same path as http://wilwheaton.net/
So I will see what I can do about the wiki content. In the meantime, as distraction I have posted a video below. What I found fascinating about this video was the sound. Its of an old Fairbanks-Morse diesel engine. The diesel does not fire on all cylinders all the time, Its firing pattern is based on load more load means more cylinders fire. The result is a real auditory treat.
I wonder if any high quality recordings of these machines have ever been made.
Enjoy
Turning the key, see if I can get this blog started
March 25th, 2012Days until BlackBerry playbook launch
April 12th, 2011So a long haul between posts, I have lots of good ideas. Good ideas are easy to come by, its the execution that is the key. Its been a busy time for me these last 10 months or so. However I am very excited by whats to come. So for now I am just posting a count down timer until the BlackBerry Playbook is launched.
Launch is only: 32 days, 14 hours, 39 minutes, 4 seconds ago away
Here are a few exciting demos that you can watch before you get in line.
Its an exciting time for all of us at QNX
Thinking about Halloween 2010
July 25th, 2010Halloween 2010 has come and gone
I have already started drafting my list of things to fix/do for the upcoming day. The coffin as worked pretty well last year. I think the project that has caused the most issues has been the flying spiders, the cables and motors have every year developed some kind of problem.
Getting Lawn Tractors online
May 11th, 2010So I have two lawn tractors and I really have to say that I enjoy keeping them running. This spring my Case 442 decided to grenade it PTO so while its waiting for parts I had to pull out the old Case 108 tractor, which has such a long list of problems and issues that I really need to weld a tool box behind the seat for when I use it.
After more hours of repair and the addition of a fancy new exhaust pipe here is a clip of the first start after sitting since last year.
DRBD State change failure
February 26th, 2010So I manage a number of multi-node VMWare clusters running on Vmware, XEN etc. Recently some of the nodes have developed a problem of not wanting to switch nodes. The error message is always the same.
State change failed: (-12) Device is held open by someone.
The problem is that the application running in that volume has stopped. The volume also unmounts and remounts with no issues. lsof returns no matches, and looking through /dev /proc returned no clues.
Looking through the support forums always returned the same fix. The volume was not unmounted, or its an application that failed. The issue is that some of these hosts are running 16 other VM Hosts all of which are important, so a reboot is not really an option, particularly if its recurring.
The solution turned out to be simple. After feeling defeated by the problem I started thinking that whatever was holding open the resource was very low level. A kernel module for example. The fix was to stop the backup agent. /etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init stop. That was it. It seems that somehow the Symantec Veritas Backup agent can get into a state where it convinces DRBD that all of its resources are still in use even when they appear to be free. Once that has happens drbdadm secondary {resource} will always return state change failure message.
Simple fix for a simple problem.
Something I would share
January 14th, 2010The culture of online memes is huge. My daily web travels cover a wide range of technical sites, DIY project sites, Some news and often something from one a web ‘aggregator’ . I am often amazed at the skills and effort people put into some of their personal projects also equally amazing is the effort put into the ‘look at me’ factor.
Which brings me to the reason for this post. Instead of posting a the latest meme or some cool project made with the latest Atmel. Its an old clip from youtube staring the Dave Brubeck band playing Take 5. Watching these musicians is fascinating. Its all craft and no flash. Pay particular attention to Joe Morello as he goes through his solo, then at 2:48 he fixes his glasses in the middle of the solo without skipping a beat. Its a simple and I am sure unconscious gesture.
Here is the clip
Quick Oneday project
November 22nd, 2009Feeling motivated and having a little free time I thought I would embark on one of my OneDay challenges. Its a simple Idea. Start and finish and electronic project in a single day. This project was a Parking Garage detector using an ATMEL ATTINY45.
I did finish it and it so far its working great.
more here
On Day Garage Door Parking bumper
Update to Openfiler and remote WebDav shares
November 19th, 2009So I have been playing with my new OpenFiler NAS and one issue that I need to face is how to back up the server to a remote location. For this I looked around for a few options and thought that WebDav may be a good solution to try. The Caveat. Openfiler does not come with a WebDav client for mounting shares, It also does not come with a GCC enabled to build executable so you cannot install the compiler and build the client.
The fix after much looking around was to install a binary compiled version of davefs2 which matches the version of neon on OpenFiler after that it was off to the cloud for a backup
more here
Openfiler install on Dell 715n
Posted some updates to the sumo pages
November 12th, 2009Just posted some drive train updates to the section on building sumo robots.
Building a Sumo robot
PXE install of OpenFiler on a Dell 715n Appliance
November 10th, 2009I have been looking to replace my two aging file servers here at home with something a little less power hungry and more cost effective to maintain. Running two sets of Raid5 stripped disks 24×7 was becoming impractical. It also was not addressing my growing concerns about protecting against data loss. I was looking for something versatile that supports protocols like WebDAV, SMB, Rsysc and can operate as ISCSI target. My search ended with Openfiler which looks to be a well packaged file system running Linux. While the IBM Server are more redundant, Triple power supplies, Dual Raid5 arrays they actually do not protect against data loss much more than the Dell does. With the launch of the Dell I will probably extend its filesystem out to use a remote target on a cloud somewhere. This way my data is stored out of sync and remotely. coupled with a near line USB backup I hopefully will feel better covered.
So the store starts when I recently acquired an old Dell 715 and thought it would be fun to convert it to run OpenFiler. It required some upgrades and a remote serial console install. Now I have a cool storage appliance running at home.
Steps here.
Dell 715n PXE install
Posted some updates